Hat tip to Tom Sullivan at Digby’s place for pointing to Ryan Cooper at The Week: Republicans are plotting economic disaster for 2016
The party's intellectual apparatus (distinct from the Trumpist insurgency) has more-or-less fully regressed to an economic libertarianism straight out of the 1920s. They view basically all government programs outside of the military and the courts as illegitimate, to be slashed or eliminated wherever possible.The only problem with this is that when you try it, the results are immediate disaster.
emphasis added
It is a continuing mystery why neither the press nor the Democratic leadership has attempted to point to what a disaster Republican rule is at the state level, or that only the Federal government is keeping those failed states afloat.
Former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback are the poster boys for tanking economies in pursuit of this born-again libertarianism. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker walks in their shadows, but aspires to greater (in effect lesser) things for his state. Louisiana is on life support. Brownback's "quack economics" have left the state with a negative job growth and its schools underfunded in violation of the state constitution. Walker, who has raised underperforming to an art form, has taken Wisconsin to 32nd in job growth over five years. Obviously, he's not working as hard at crushing his state's economy as he is at destroying Wisconsin's premier university system. Wrecking public education is theme here, if you need it pointed out. It would have been far worse for these states, Cooper writes, if the federal government (that is, the rest of us) weren't backstopping these failed experiments.
If you are wondering why the GOP is making such a big deal out of babies, bedrooms and bathrooms at the moment, it’s called Changing the Subject. It’s like distracting a mark while you pick his pocket. (And when the Panama Papers dealing with the U.S. come out, we might find out just where that money is ending up.)
Read Cooper and Sullivan. It’s worth your time and neither is all that long.